Without Preservation, the Village Would Be Much More Expensive and a Million Times Uglier: An Interview with Village Preservation’s Andrew Berman, by Phyllis Eckhaus

The New York City landmarks law, enacted by the city in 1965, is increasingly controversial, misunderstood, and under attack. As one typical critic put it, landmarking is “a way for government-empowered preservationists to obstruct new development…[E]ntire neighborhoods of marginal historical value are frozen in time, hindering the ability of cities and their residents to adjust their built environments in response to changing economic circumstances.”

I recently spoke to Village Preservation Executive Director Andrew Berman, asking him to make the case for landmarking. The following interview has been edited.

Landmarking as boon to city economy
PE: Talk to me about the history and the impact of the landmarks law.
AB: This year’s the 60th anniversary of the landmarks law. Many years in the making, it came about in part because New York was seeing so much of its great heritage destroyed, everything from the great monuments like Pennsylvania Station—which to this day we still mourn the loss of—to neighborhoods and local landmarks that were being destroyed by Robert Moses, highways, neglect, voracious developers and the like. Collectively, the consensus was that this was a trend we needed to stop and reverse. There needed to be some way of designating and saving parts of our city that were considered historically significant, that they shouldn’t be torn down unless there were really some very exceptional circumstances, such as they were unsafe or there was no way of making money, while maintaining them.

The average person doesn’t understand that attached to the landmark’s law is this provision which says that you’re entitled to be able to make a healthy profit on your building while preserving it. And if you can’t, then you do actually get to destroy it. It’s actually very rare that you can’t make a healthy profit on one of these older historic buildings, if you choose to do so. While there have been a few cases where people have proven they can’t make a profit and have been allowed to destroy or alter their landmark, for the most part, the landmark designation stays in place because it’s completely compatible with the bottom line.

Between four to five percent of the city, depending on how you measure it, is landmarked, although that includes places like Central Park—these vast spaces that are landmarks, but they’re also parks, you know? They’re supposed to continue to be parks, and they continue to change and grow, even with landmark designation. But clearly many have become among the most economically successful in the city.

Landmarking can be an economic development tool when used appropriately. It’s very clear that historic neighborhoods and historic sites can thrive. They can be a source of investment, they can attract tourism and business investment, they can be great places to live, all of those things, so they really are in many ways a boon for the city. Now, that’s not to say, “oh well, let’s just landmark everything, and that will make our city idyllic.” There’s reasons why certain buildings and neighborhoods are landmarked, and even after landmark designation, There’s all sorts of real world challenges that they continue to face, which landmark designation doesn’t necessarily solve. But overall I would say, landmarking does a lot more good than any downsides that may come along with it.

Soho as landmarking success
PE: Could you unpack that with an example?
AB: One is Soho, to use an extreme example, but still an example. That neighborhood was intended to be completely destroyed to make way for a highway in the 1960s, and it was at that point, a largely, If not entirely abandoned, very underutilized neighborhood, with 50, 75, 100 year old buildings that had not only gone out of fashion, but were outdated for what they had been built to do, which typically was manufacturing, storage, warehouses, buildings of that nature. A lot of people saw them as these incredibly beautiful buildings. Also an incredibly important part of our city’s history because they were cast iron, which was revolutionary material at the mid-19th century that allowed us to create fireproof structures, larger, taller structures, structures with more light, air, windows, all of that sort of nature.

And artists were looking for cheap places to live with high ceilings, high windows, light and air, and they start moving into this neighborhood. and fortunately, they were also able to get much of the neighborhood landmarked in the 1970s. And in the time since then, Soho has obviously been an unbelievable economic engine for the city. If anything, it’s been perhaps a victim of its own success, but nobody can deny that it’s one of the most beautiful parts of New York City. It’s a place that people flock to from not only the city, the region, but the world. Part of the reason for that is because it looks and feels like no place else, and landmark designation is the reason why that is the case.

PE: When you say that, it’s arguably a victim of its own success what are you thinking of?
AB: Sometimes being too popular has its downsides. Soho’s also been a victim of incredibly poor regulation by the city and the city not following its own rules for many years. A lot of these huge oversized retail stores that moved into the neighborhood were actually illegal under zoning regulations, and the city just turned a blind eye.

The city also did have in place a system that had been established to help ensure that the people who lived in the neighborhood were all working artists, because originally this was an area that you weren’t allowed to live in, but they carved out a special exception for working artists and created a system for ensuring that people who could prove they were artists would be the ones who were allowed to live there and then the city, just increasingly turned a blind eye. So it’s a very complicated story.

One of the many challenges that the neighborhood did face—because it was so unique, so wonderful, and because the people who discovered it and saved it put such incredible love and care into it—it became this incredibly desirable place that everybody wanted to be in and get a piece of.

The LPC’s lost independence
PE: So what’s changed since the landmarks law was first enacted?
AB: A lot of things have changed. One of them is that the Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC) is much less independent than it used to be. The idea when it was established was that these independent experts were supposed to be appointed by the mayor and approved by the city council, but then they sort of got to do what they in their own best judgment thought was correct. There were checks and balances—you know, the city council could overturn a designation, and there were all sorts of things that could be done to make sure the LPC didn’t run amuck.

What’s happened in the last several years is that the commission has become completely a creature of the mayor. The people who are appointed to it basically do what city hall tells them to do. We issued a report last year that showed that under the Adams administration, new landmark designations have sunk to an all-time low—fewer than under Abe Beam’s administration, who was of course struggling with bankruptcy and Gerald Ford telling the city to drop dead. And fewer than under Rudy Giuliani, who was of course completely in bed with his real estate donors. So, Adams is even worse than those two mayors in the very limited amount of new landmark designations that have taken place.

PE: And what about the LPC’s responsibility for enforcing the law?
AB: They’re supposed to make sure that landmarked buildings remain standing, and particularly in recent years, they and the department of buildings have done a poor job of that. We’ve seen an increasing number of cases where, whether it’s been through neglect or faulty work, landmarked buildings have come down. They’ve been destroyed. They’ve been razed.

We’ve also seen the commission increasingly approve demolitions and really out-of -scale new construction in historic districts that in previous years would have been unimaginable. [Author’s note: A “historic district” is a multi-building area with a distinct sense of place; the LPC’s designation of a historic district effectively landmarks all the buildings within that district. Greenwich Village has multiple historic districts.]

Now, a certain number of demolitions and a certain amount of new construction should be allowed in historic districts. They’re not meant to preserve things in amber, and one of the things about having a historic district is sometimes within those boundaries that you’ve drawn, not every single building is historically significant, so it’s okay to let it go and replace it with something new.

Unfortunately, we’ve seen too many examples where the commission has let go of buildings that clearly were historically significant and allowed them to be replaced with buildings that don’t make sense within the district. I love a good new building in a historic district, and it doesn’t mean that it has to mimic or imitate the historic architecture around it or pretend it’s 200 years old when it was just built, but it needs to relate to, contribute to, and I think in a lot of cases arguably defer to, the surrounding historic buildings. And too frequently, that’s not what’s happening.

It’s very clear that both city hall and the real estate industry have too much power over the Landmarks Preservation Commission and what they do. And the sad thing is that sometimes the commission can be extremely zealous, in a few cases maybe even a little overzealous, in terms of how tightly they regulate things, but usually that’s for the little guy. The big guy gets very great latitude and leeway, or is simply left alone and not touched.

That’s one of the reasons why I think sometimes there is friction or resentment around the commission because if you don’t have the power and connections they can weigh quite heavily on you, and if you do have the power and connections you can get away with murder a little too often.

PE: Do you want to speak to what’s changed, in terms of the commissioners arguably being disempowered?
AB: The way the commission operates now, the chair has a tremendous amount of power, in a way that I think is greater than was originally envisioned. And one of the reasons why that is significant is because all eleven of the members of the commission are appointed by the mayor, but only the chair is a paid position.

So the mayor, actually, in a lot of ways, exerts much more influence over the chair than he or she does over all the other members of the commission, and it’s also much easier to control one person than it is to control eleven people. So one of the checks and balances that, I think, was originally intended for the commission— having it be this body of eleven from every part of the city, representing a variety of different experiences, professions and things of that nature—those ten have been disempowered while the chair has been empowered. And as we’ve seen on many levels, having too much power in any one person is often not a good thing.

Affordable housing and the trickle-down theory
PE: What about the public perception of preservation as an obstacle to affordable housing?
AB: I think that has become an increasingly commonly held misconception, that preservation is directly in opposition to issues like affordability, that it’s an impediment to affordability and that preservation is just about buildings and not about people. And if you care about people, you’re not really that concerned about preservation and if you’re concerned about preservation, you don’t really care that much about people.

I do think that architecture and design is incredibly interesting and valuable, but a big part of what makes preservation so important is that it’s the stories of people. It’s our story, it’s the story of the various communities struggles, movements, etc. that have really shaped our lives over the years.

It’s funny. So I’ve been working at Village Preservation for 23 years now. When I started working there, the real estate folks were constantly working against us, and their argument was preservation strangles economic development: If you do historic preservation, you’re going to strangle the economy. That has been so profoundly disproven that they’ve now taken the opposite argument, which is to say historic preservation makes the city a place where only the rich and monied can live. It’s basically too successful economically, so then they put forward other people to make that affordable housing argument for them, because nobody is going to believe that argument coming from Big Real Estate.

Big Real Estate has been very much involved in this campaign to paint preservation —meaning anything that limits how much development can take place—as an enemy of affordability. They’ve really very successfully gotten people to think in this kind of 1984 sort of way—you know, up is down, black is white, day is night, claiming that if we just let everybody build more, the effects will trickle down beneficially. We’ll all have lower rents. We’ll all be able to buy property cheap and live happily ever after.

I think that the argument that the more building you allow to take place, the cheaper everything becomes is absolutely wrong. I actually think there’s a lot of evidence that sometimes it has the opposite effect, which is that things get more expensive.

To the degree to which lots of building helps with prices, evidence indicates the impact is limited to very expensive apartments. So, when you allow the market to build a lot, it’s going to build at the upper end of the market. So very expensive apartments get a bit cheaper, everything else doesn’t. And in fact, you oftentimes see the stuff at the low end of the market getting more expensive at the same time. So, I just came back from Vancouver, British Columbia, which is an incredibly beautiful, very livable city, but they, for the last several decades, have been all in on this idea that you want to promote as much housing construction as possible, and that that’s a good way to maintain the city’s health. They have built more housing over the last several decades in Vancouver per person than any other city in North America. They’ve also seen their housing prices go up more quickly than any other city in North America, during that same time period. It’s very clear that saying “just let the developers build as much as they want, and build a lot,” is not going to help in terms of housing prices, and it may actually hurt.

PE: Are there other things you want to say about affordability and preservation? For example, even people who support preservation comment “Well, the Village is beautiful, but it’s kind of like a movie set. And you know, most people can’t live there”?
AB: What I would say is, if the Village was not so well preserved, two things would happen. It would actually be much more expensive and a million times uglier.

All of the beautiful old buildings, some of them still have rent stabilized units in them—with old-time residents who’ve been there for a very long time, and who are sort of holding on. Those old buildings would all be gone, and replaced with exceedingly, exceedingly expensive new high-rise buildings, where most of the residents would live there as one of three, four, five homes that they own.

So, you know, if anything, I think that preservation tends to have the effect of slowing down the process of gentrification and then you need other strategies to actually address the gentrification, but the preservation is not only not the cause, if anything, it’s a bit of a mitigating factor.

Persuading the public
PE: How do we build the case for landmarking, for preservation?
AB: I think we point to both how incredibly important and successful preservation has been to cities. New York is never gonna be able to out Dubai, Dubai—you know, we’re never going to be able to be better at doing some of the things that some other newer cities can do—but one of the reasons for our appeal is the fact that the city has a character and energy, a vitality, a mix of people that other cities just don’t have. And certainly our historic buildings are a big part of that.

I mean, people come to New York to see the parts of the city that are not like any place else in America, whether it’s the Village, Little Italy, Soho, the Upper West Side, all of these classic New York neighborhoods that TV shows are set in, movies are filmed in, that just don’t exist other places in America. No place else. Other places don’t look like that. Other places don’t function like that, so holding on to those parts of our city is incredibly important to our success. and then also understanding that it’s not an impediment to our goals for affordability. And in fact, if anything, it can be, I would say moderately helpful.

We have to do other things to help ensure that our city remains affordable, just doing preservation by itself absolutely will not do it. It’ll slow down the losses; it won’t create the solution. We have to create the solutions as well, which I would argue is A), wherever possible and appropriate, build really, truly affordable housing. Not this mandatory inclusionary stuff where you get to build three or four times as much super luxury as you would normally be able to build and in exchange we get a small amount of quote, unquote, affordable housing that’s still unaffordable to the majority of New Yorkers. And B) do everything that we can to hold on to and perpetuate the existing, affordable housing that we have, which we’re doing a terrible job of, and which we’re losing at a rapid rate every day. Sometimes, we’re losing to these build build build schemes, where the people are saying, well, if we just loosened up the regulations and let everybody you know, tear everything down and build more new stuff we’d be in better shape. That’s part of the reason why we’re losing so much of our existing affordable housing.

PE: How does one get that argument across given the money and sway of the other side?
AB: It is a challenge, and we use every means at our disposal, from social media to reports. We are trying to make sure that people understand the fallacies behind the story that they’re being told, as well as the truth behind what preservation actually does.

And you know, we’re trying to reach people both with the data, the numbers, so, we’re aiming for their head. But we’re also aiming for their hearts. We’re telling them the stories about these places that they can relate to—these are places where our history was changed, whether it’s in terms of civil rights movements, or artistic, and on literary or musical movements that they know and love, and that have shaped their lives. Here are the places where things happened, and we don’t want them torn down just to make way for faceless new condo high-rises. So part of it is about making sure stories get out there that appeal to both our rational side and our emotional side.

PE: What about trying to break through to new constituencies?
AB: We certainly work hard to try to build alliances wherever we can. And, in terms of young people, I’ll just say, we’ve recently expanded our staff, so we have somebody who specifically focuses on social media and many of our staff are young people. We use their perspective and insights as a way to help shape what we do and how we get our message across.
Sometimes we break through and we can get quite a bit of full coverage for the work we do. Other times, it’s like banging our head against the wall, and that’s why we have a two-prong strategy there as well. We try to get what we have to say out to the traditional media, but we also make sure that we have our own channels for getting it out so that we can project our message unfiltered.

PE: What else should readers know?
AB: I would argue most New Yorkers are, in fact, preservationists, even if they would never use that term to describe themselves. I do believe, from my conversations that I have with people, that most New Yorkers care about the stuff that they see around them that feels special, that feels like it has some kind of story and richness attached to it, and that that’s part of what they love about being here.

I mean, look, let’s be honest. New York is probably the least convenient city in the world to live in. You know, it’s very challenging. There are unique challenges that you have here that you don’t have anywhere else, but people want to live here because it has a character that you don’t find elsewhere. So the people who are here in many cases are here because they love what New York is.

And they recognize that means that things are going to change. There’s a need for growth, there’s areas for improvement—but they don’t want to see the city that they love erased and replaced with something faceless and completely interchangeable with what can be found anywhere. I do believe that by far the majority of New Yorkers feel that way, even if they would never use the P word to describe it.